S&P 500 · January 20, 2009
Fear of Bank Nationalisation
-5.28%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
The Global Financial Crisis bear market
near the end of it · 2007-10-09 → 2009-03-09, -56.78% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- 20 January 2009 — S&P 500 fell 5.28%. More than a year into the crisis, still no bottom
- The fear was specific: calculations suggested major banks' losses could exceed their capital
- In which case governments would have to take them over — and in a nationalisation, existing shareholders are effectively wiped out
- Bank shares collapsed to reflect that possibility
- That collapse fed distrust of the financial system, which fed the collapse
- Fell 44.24% from peak. The market's final bottom came about six weeks later
Sources
Every figure on this page is recomputed from the original daily closing prices and checked against them at build time. The account of what happened is written from the sources listed above.